Mining comedy Gold

I first interviewed Elon Gold around 15 years ago. He had just signed on to his first big TV series, a lead role in “Stacked.” That was a short-lived Fox sitcom — 19 episodes over two seasons — about two brothers who owned a San Francisco bookstore and their unlikely employee.

The name of the woman who played the employee was Pamela Anderson. Gold was one of the brothers.

I was happy for Elon then, but I was happier for myself because I struck comedy Gold. Oh, the witty opportunities this gave me:

“It’s not the bosom of Abraham that Elon Gold will be near every Wednesday at 8:30.”

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“Never in the history of television have the people of the book (store) had it so good.” And Elon cheerfully played along. No, he told me, his wife was not worried about possible complications with Pamela.

“My wife wasn’t threatened at all, because her theory is that Pam is so beautiful I don’t have a chance,” he told me back then. “Her theory is that the more beautiful the actress, the less chance I have.”

But I was also happy because writing about Gold gave me an opportunity to kvell. Elon grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx. His parents — Lynn and Sidney — were New York City school teachers (dad became an assistant principal) and Elon and his brothers attended yeshivas through high school. And most impressively, he was willing to jeopardize his Big Break if it meant violating Shabbat.

Gold was a last-minute addition to the cast, joining when another actor was let go just before taping was slated to begin. The show’s creator, Steve Levitan (“Modern Family”), auditioned Gold on a Friday that coincidentally was both Purim and Good Friday. Fox execs wanted to see him the next day, Shabbas, but because Gold couldn’t — wouldn’t — do it, Levitan taped him and forwarded that to Fox.

The execs clearly saw the same qualities in Elon that Levitan did and hired him. “It was my Purim miracle,” Gold told me. In fact, Fox and Levitan went out of their way to make life easy for Gold. Sitcom tapings, normally on Friday, were moved to Tuesday and Thursday. Friday work — table reads and such — were designed so Elon could get home before nightfall. There was even a PA assigned to get kosher food for him from a nearby deli.

So when word went out that Gold had booked an appearance at NJPAC on September 22, it seemed a great excuse to reconnect. Better still, my YouTube research showed that he was still spreading The Word to his audiences. On a late-night TV show, for example, he even had the band laughing when he discussed the Nazis who believe Jews want to replace them

“Replace you? We just want to manage your portfolio. If we replace you, how are we going to invoice you? Did you think that far ahead?”

Looks like I struck Gold again. But…

Further research revealed that 10 years ago, almost to the day, Gold and his family were walking home from a Shabbat dinner at a friend’s house when they were verbally assaulted. A Mercedes SUV containing what Gold described as “four Middle Eastern men in their 20s” pulled alongside. One in the back seat rolled down his window and shouted “Free Palestine.” Another got out of the and yelled at Elon, his wife and four children: “I hope your children die. Just like you are killing children in Gaza.”

According to the police who later responded to his home, what occurred was a “hate incident,” because the perp only hoped Gold’s children died, he didn’t threaten to kill them. That would have been a hate crime.

“That changed everything for me,” Gold told me over Zoom from a New York City hotel room. “That was my first real experience with latent and direct anti-Semitism. It was such a wake-up call. I never thought in my own neighborhood, in my own little world that I had created for myself, living in L.A. in a Jewish neighborhood, being with my family, that a group of Middle Eastern men would accost us and threaten us and scream ‘I hope your children die.’

“They’re buying into the false narrative that Israel is killing everyone on purpose and making all Jews culpable for what’s going on in a conflict in the Middle East. It’s as if you could scream at all Americans for dead Afghan or Iraqi civilians because the American army went to war with them. As if you could scream at a Russian person for what Putin is doing in Ukraine. But apparently, you’re allowed to scream at any Jew for what the Israeli army is doing, which is defending the free world, not just Israel.”

Given the circumstances, I asked if anyone had advised him to tone down his act.

“That’s a very good question, because I was just on a call on Zoom with Coleman Domingo, the great actor,” he answered. “He’s involved in a documentary about my younger brother, Ari Gold, who was a gay pop star and a pioneer and trailblazer for the LGBTQ community.” Ari died of leukemia in 2021, three days after his 47th birthday. “We were talking about how the whole world told Ari to tone it down. It doesn’t have to be gay. Just do love songs, they don’t have to be about men. Even Elton John isn’t doing love songs about men, and everybody knows he’s gay.

“But I’ve never been told to tone down the thing. Thank God, because I wouldn’t, like my brother. You have to own what you are, be proud of what you are and revel in it. You can’t tell a person to stop being themselves.”

He disagrees when I suggest there must be some places where he can’t be himself, in Iowa for example, where I imagine Jewish audiences are few and very far between.

“There are no places I can’t perform,” he told me. “There are just times. For example, tonight is Tisha B’Av. I will not be performing tonight. There are times I can’t perform. There are no places that I can’t perform. I could do showtime at the Apollo. I just can’t do it tonight or any Friday night. Or on Kol Nidre night. There are no places, because comedy is universal.

“I’ve been here, in New York, all month, at the Comedy Cellar. My shows were attended by people from all over the world. They sell out every night. On Thursday, I’m going to do the Chabad of West Hampton, and that’s a different audience, where I’m going to do a different act. I’m one of those rare comedians that have two acts.

“One is a secular act, where I clearly identify as Jewish and talk about being Jewish, but I also talk about being married and being a dad and politics. And there is this one at Chabad that is a very Jewish act, where I will talk about Tisha B’Av. I can’t do it anywhere else. I’m a comedian. I adjust accordingly to where I am. But there are no constraints. There’s no audience that won’t enjoy good comedy.”

Still, “every now and then I get a ‘hey, Jew bastard.’ But to me, that’s like someone yelling, ‘hey, fat boy.’ I don’t take it personally. It’s my job to find the funny in that hate. It’s my job to poke fun at it. I love doing that, because you get to expose the ignorance of bigotry. That’s how I handle it. I make fun of the haters and the hatred out there and the hypocrisy.

“It’s definitely an adjustment. Antisemitism skipped a generation. My kids are experiencing a level of antisemitism I never had. My father knew about the deepest type of antisemitism because his entire family was killed in the Holocaust. His parents got out early, but he never knew his uncles or cousins or grandparents. Me, I heard about it.”

In one respect, though, nothing has changed: audiences still want to laugh. “Audiences are audiences,” he said. “They want to escape. It’s like why you go to a movie or why you go to a Broadway show. They’re not laughing less now any more than they would be laughing more in good times.”

In the course of the interview, I discovered that Ari and Elon were not the first ones in their family to dabble in show business.

“We never had money,” Elon explained. “But my father was obsessed with the theater, with Broadway and musicals, and he wanted to be an investor. So he would get invited to all these Broadway backers auditions, where you go see the play in its nascent form with about 30, 40 or 50 people. And then if you’re investing $100 or $1,000, whatever it is, you could be an investor. It’s like buying a stock.

“Every show he would invest in, 100 bucks or whatever he had, he would lose it, because most shows open and close on the same day. He went to one, though, and he came home and said ‘this is the greatest show I’ve ever seen. But I’m not going to invest in it, because it is too Jewish.

“And of course that play was ‘Fiddler.’ I would have moved out of the Bronx years ago if he didn’t have the fear of being too Jewish. I learned that for myself and my act. I will never be afraid of being too Jewish. You can’t be too Black. You can’t be too anything.

“The more you lean into who you are, the more people accept you.

Elon Gold will appear at NJPAC in Newark on September 22; for more information and tickets, go to njpac.org and search for his name. He returns to the area on December 28 for a show at the Paramount in Huntington, on Long Island.